Technical Field
The field of the invention is ancillary devices for patient medical care, particularly bags or receptacles for storing and carrying fluid hose.
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a group of diseases—which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis—which cause breathing-related problems and airflow restriction. According to the CDC, approximately 16 million Americans have been diagnosed with COPD (almost 7% of the population). The number of people with this condition is presumably much higher: the COPD Foundation estimated the total number affected at 30 million, which is generally in line with the NIH (which estimated 12 million undiagnosed COPD cases in 2012).
Worse yet, chronic lower respiratory disease is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., with COPD causing over half of the deaths from lung diseases. [source: NIH's National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. 2012 Morbidity and Mortality: Chart Book on Cardiovascular, Lung, and Blood Diseases. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/research/reports/2012-mortality-chart-book]
COPD is costly. The CDC estimated that the costs attributable to having COPD were approximately $32 billion in 2010, paid as follows: Medicare paid 51%, Medicaid paid 25% and private insurance paid 18%. “By 2020 it is expected that the cost of medical care for adults with COPD will be more than $90 billion . . . ” [source: CDC website.]
For people with COPD or similar condition, oxygen therapy is often prescribed by their doctors for the related medical conditions. In fact, about 14% of patients are prescribed oxygen therapy. [source: Direct costs of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease among managed care patients, Anand A Dalal, Laura Christensen, Fang Liu, and Aylin A Riedel, Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2010; 5: 341-349. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2962300]
Out of the total of $32 billion, Medicare spends a great deal on home oxygen equipment itself. According to the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2004, “Total Medicare reimbursements for costs related to [oxygen therapy] exceed $2 billion/year and are increasing at an annual rate of 12 to 13%.” [source: Long-term Oxygen Treatment in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Recommendations for Future Research, Thomas L. Croxton, William C. Bailey, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine Vol 174. pp. 373-378, 2006. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/research/reports/2006-oxygen-treatment] [Back in 1997, Medicare was spending $1.8 billion annually for home oxygen equipment for COPD, so the pace appeared to accelerate. Source: Long-Term Oxygen Therapy: New insights and perspectives, pp 221-232, Chapter 19: The Economic Impact of Long-Term Oxygen Therapy Lorenzo G. Mantovani, Marco Cristiani, Gianluca Furneri. 2012.]
The National Home Oxygen Patients Association claimed in 2012 that over one million people used supplementary oxygen, but considering an estimated 800,000 people used home oxygen in 1995; presumably, the numbers are substantially higher now [Source: O'Donohue W J and A L Plummer, Magnitude of usage and cost of home oxygen therapy in the United States, Chest 107: 301-302, 1995].
There are three common sources of medical oxygen: concentrators, compressed gas, or liquid. Patients are required to pull around a wheeled tank. Most concentrators, on the other hand, are large, stationary units.
All three require the use of oxygen tubing from the tanks or concentrator to the patient's cannula. The tubing or hose that connects to the concentrator and the patient can easily become tangled and hinder free and easy movement of the patient.
Loose hose underfoot poses a tripping threat that could lead to the patient—or others—falling. Loose hose also increases the potential of kinking, pinching, or other obstruction of the hose and its gas flow. These risks are amplified if the patient has mobility issues and/or uses a walker, cane or wheelchair in addition to medical gas therapy equipment. In hospital and at home, extra hose is sometimes looped and hung from IV stands or tank carts, or even draped over the tanks themselves, practices which have the same drawbacks.
Background Art
Some current methods to address this loose or excess hose problem are expensive and not easily maintained, nor are they easy to install or set up. They can be large and/or heavy. They are not intuitive. Some methods rely on a spool to wrap the hose around, which can lead to pinching and kinking of the hose. Spooling increases twisting of hose, by forcing it in a fixed position around a spool. Spooling methods add bulk as well because of the spool diameter. See, e.g., US Patent Application 2005/0028493 A1, published Feb. 10, 2005, from Small.
Other methods rely on ceiling mounted devices that are difficult to install and to use and maintain, and are far less mobile than a carried container. Other methods available manage excess hose by means of an accordion type jacket or gather placed around a section of the excess hose, which is an imperfect solution because of device bulk; and the device can itself become a hazard. See, e.g., US Patent Application 2015/0075528 A1, published Mar. 19, 2015, from Kudo, which shows how a gather will apply continual pressure on the patient because the device itself can create hazardous or inconvenient tension or “springiness,” as noted in that application. And that type of solution can prevent the patient from using both hands for other tasks.
Another method is to use a soft-sided sack used to collect hose, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,739,913, issued Apr. 26, 1988, to Moore and U.S. Pat. No. 8,028,834 B2, issued Oct. 4, 2011, to Lill. However, using only a flexible fabric bag leads to bunching and twisting of the hose while in the container and can lead to pinching and kinking of the hose, and which causes difficulty when extracting the hose from the bag.
Some soft-bag methods try to get around the bunching and twisting issues inherent in soft side bags by teaching using a single, typically centered, rib to provide some structure to a soft hose bag, but this solution does very little to maintain the interior volume of the collection container, other than to keep constant the distance from the bag's top to bottom.
Extraction is also an issue with soft bags, as they are particularly problematic in an emergency situation, when it's necessary to remove the hose from the bag quickly and untangle it. Anyone having to quickly pull items from a soft-sided backpack can attest to this, particularly when it's on the person's back.
Other alternative methods include hard-sided cases for hose, such as U.S. Pat. No. 7,487,791 B1, issued Feb. 10, 2009 to Bradley. This method is best suited to collecting loose hose once, but poorly suited to repeated collection and extraction because the hose is essentially clipped in place.
Further, these bagging or clipping methods do not offer functional means of collecting the hose into the bag, other than manually stuffing the hose in by hand.
The present invention seeks to offer a low cost, easy to manufacture, easy to maintain and use system that more completely manages the problem of excess hose for the patient or a person who wants to make sure hose is safely collected and not underfoot.